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They said it wouldn’t happen but blood has turned on blood, and Rob Cesternino and Stephen Fishbach return to break down all the drama live on Survivor Know It Alls!

Laura Morett took the news of her impending vote off pretty well, and Stephen points out that Laura seemed very desperate to put a positive spin on her downfall by relating it back to Ciera growing and maturing through the game. He feels that it’s actually betrayal and bad gameplay, and Laura is too blind to realize it. Rob agrees, believing Ciera is a better player because Laura was allowing herself to roll over and die for her. Stephen doesn’t agree she’s a better player, believing Laura isn’t a worse player just because she’s going along with her daughter’s plan. Stephen feels that Laura wants to use their relationship to go further in the game and Ciera is basically just saying “nope” to that plan. Rob asks what their move should have been, and Stephen thinks that Laura and Ciera needed to go to Monica or Hayden, anyone really, to try and flip the game on Tyson. Rob thinks this is a tough move to pull off with 8 people left, and more ideal with a pair (Hayden and Caleb being the most logical), but Katie is desperate and they could have created a block of 5 to blindside him. Stephen says the fact that Ciera and Laura didn’t even try to save her is what makes this move particularly bad, and believes Ciera’s strategy of coasting to the end to become someone’s goat on the jury is still worse than Laura’s strategy of at least trying to play the game and put herself in a position to win.

The chat room interrupts to protest that we don’t know for sure whether Ciera and Laura really didn’t try at all to save Laura, but Stephen remains not a big fan of these fan fiction excuses. Because we didn’t see any real communication, he’s skeptical that anything really substantial happened on this front. Rob mentions that Ciera said on Twitter that Hayden, Caleb, and Monica wouldn’t work with Laura, so this probably confirms what Stephen was originally thinking anyway. Rob also wants to know who Ciera thinks she’s in the final 3 with, and what plan she has that she doesn’t want screwed up? Stephen says that it could be either the pair of Caleb/Hayden or Tyson/Gervase, but thinks back to what Monica said in a previous episode about how making a plan like that doesn’t really matter if you don’t think you can beat the people sitting next to you at the end. He also says that returning players tend to realize they coasted too much and didn’t make the big move in their first time around, so Laura should probably realize Ciera is veering off course.

Rob is confused that so many people soundly rejected working with Laura, saying he would bend over backwards to get to the end with the Moretts for what one would assume is an easy win. Stephen plays Devil’s Advocate by bringing up that the camp narrative is how threatening Laura is, with her wins at Redemption Island and etc. While Rob and Stephen both agree though that it was strong gameplay by Ciera to call Katie’s bluff re: the hidden immunity idol (Stephen says we’ve rarely seen something like that on the show), they both say Ciera’s major mistake was telling Tyson about the move, because that was the moment Tyson realized Laura and Ciera had the potential to at least try to make moves and it sealed the deal for him that Laura needed to go. Stephen, however, doesn’t feel this was the move of a mastermind, adding that he was surprised it was only then Tyson even realized she was playing the game. Stephen feels that’s a testament to how well Ciera must have been playing under the radar until this episode.

One of Stephen’s biggest problems with Ciera voting out her mom is that he doesn’t think Ciera definitely told Laura she’d be voting her out. Neither Stephen nor Rob can envision a scenario that wouldn’t be securing an absolute win where they would vote their moms out of the game. Rob asks Stephen what the percent chance is that Ciera wins, and Stephen feels it’s currently non-zero, maybe 15% – it’s likely she could make the end as the obvious third place finisher, and she would at least definitely have a hypothetical vote from Laura.

Rob was also bothered by the immunity challenge tonight, which Monica won along with a hot dog lunch with another player that Jeff Probst allowed her to give up to the entire rest of the tribe. He and Stephen don’t understand why Monica basically got to make up the rules of who was allowed to eat as long as she wasn’t one of them. Stephen mentions that the point of these decisions is to expose tribe dynamics, so it’s not good when Jeff allows her to just neutralize a decision like that. If she had taken Tyson and Gervase, he feels that might have actually had game implications. Rob also adds that if Monica thinks she earned something from that move, she is sorely mistaken. Stephen disagrees somewhat, saying it buys her at least a few days of good will, but Rob thinks it means he would then have to get rid of her because everyone liked her.

At the end of the show, Rob and Stephen take questions from the listeners: How funny would it have been if someone else had written “Mom” on their vote for Laura? Is Tyson getting the winner’s edit? Would Survivor be a better TV show if Jeff Probst announced that the immunity idol had been found but didn’t reveal who had it? And should the contestants on Redemption Island get to watch Tribal Council a la the boardroom scenes on Celebrity Apprentice? The answers to these questions and more on Survivor Know It Alls!

Will Ciera vote out her Mom on Survivor Blood vs Water?

Special Thanks to Brendan Noel for an outstanding job with tonight’s podcast recap!